Google bends to Chinese on censorship demands and are
Chinese Military hacking other Governments?
Google records every search. Every click. Sets cookies that last years. Stores
your gmail forever. Scans your hard drive.
Has Google paid too high a price for entry into the Chinese market?
Google co-founder Sergey Brin talked about Google's acquiescence to China's censorship
demands.
Google's acceptance of Chinese government controls on what citizens can and cannot search
has drawn comments and complaints from a range of people spanning from bloggers to
Congressional representatives.
Brin said he believed Google is "doing the right thing" with their work in
China: "We ultimately made a difficult decision, but we felt that by participating
there, and making our services more available, even if not to the 100 percent that we
ideally would like, that it will be better for Chinese Web users, because ultimately they
would get more information, though not quite all of it."
Human Rights Watch leader Ken Ross gave his opinion on the subject: I'm sure Google
justifies this by saying it's just a couple of search words that people can't get to, but
it's very difficult for Google to do what they just did and avoid the slippery slope. The
next thing they'll do is ask them to tell them who is searching for "Taiwan" or
"independence" or "human rights." And then it's going to find itself
in the position of turning over the names of dissidents or simply of inquisitive
individuals, for imprisonment.
Ross suggested that the search engines could face down China over censorship if they band
together. That isn't going to happen, as none of the big search engines want to yield the
promise of multi-billion dollar profits from the fast-growing Internet user base in China
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Google records every search. Every click. Sets cookies that last years. Stores
your gmail forever. Scans your hard drive.
The case of the US v Google has created shockwaves among users, as people start to think
about just how much personally identifying information Google and the other search giants
collect. The shockwaves have hit Washington as Rep. Edward Market (D-Mass) announced plans
to introduce legislation to limit what they can collect.
You knew Google records every search. Every click. Sets cookies that last years. Stores
your gmail forever. Scans your hard drive. And so on. You also realize that there's really
no personally identifying information in the mountainous gobs of URLs and search queries
the government is asking for. Even so, you're getting uncomfortable, you're thinking,
maybe I should be more circumspect.
You're not alone, reports Katie Hafner of the NY Times. Meet Kathryn Hanson, who worries
that her Googling of the Britishism "rent boy" (male prostitute) would land her
in a "Navy prison in the dead of night." And Jim Kowats, a former Discovery
Channel producer who did a lot of searching on "circumcision" for an upcoming
program. "When you're researching something like that and you look up the word
'circumcision,' you're going to end up with all kinds of pictures of naked children,"
he said. "And that can be misconstrued."
Susan P. Crawford, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York, agreed that the
sheer volume of information obtained by the government was likely to dilute privacy
threats.
"More experienced Internet users would understand that in the mountain of
search-related data available in response to a subpoena, it is very unlikely that anything
referring to them personally would be revealed," Professor Crawford said.
She likened one's online activity to walking down the street. "We walk down the
street all the time and we can be seen there," she said. "We also move around
online, and can be 'seen' to some extent there as well. But we continue to go for
walks."
Still, there appears to be a chilling effect on users' willingness to research freely.
[Hanson] pointed to a continuing interest she has in the Palestinian elections. "If I
followed my curiosity and did some Web research, going to Web sites of the parties
involved, I would honestly wonder whether someone in my government would someday see my
name on a list of people who went to 'terrorist' Web sites," she said.
Mr. Kowats, the television producer, shares that fear. "Where does it stop?" he
said. "What about file sharing? Scalping tickets? Or traveling to Cuba? What if you
look up abortion? Who says you can't look up those things? What are the limits? It's the
little chipping away. It's a slippery slope."
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Top U.S. military cyberwarriors recently said that adversaries probe DOD computers within
minutes of the systems' coming online. The cyberwarriors described DOD's computer network
defense strategy as a battle of attrition in which neither side has an advantage. Retired
Army officers and industry officials say Chinese hackers are the primary culprits.
Reports out of the United States said the U.S. military was assaulted by hackers working
out of China. SANS suggested this was done with Chinese military support. Over Christmas
break, hackers attacked Parliament in London, once again by China.
Security experts believe the attacks came from southern China in the Guangdong province.
This is the same area hacks to the U.S. military computer systems came from.
The Guardian quoted insiders saying, "These were not normal hackers. The degree of
sophistication was extremely high. They were very clever programmers."
While the British Government had no statement yet, warnings have been floating around for
years about the possibility of assaults on the cyber systems of the U.K. The same Guardian
article talked to Commodore Patrick Tyrrell, the U.K.'s first director of information
warfare, and he put out warnings a decade ago.
"This could certainly be seen as a provocative act. Up until now,
governments have not set much store by information," Commodore Tyrrell, now managing
director of the computer company Vale Atlantic told the Guardian. "The government has
to take seriously the way this kind of attack is developing."
Let's put some facts together now. The "Titan Rain" cyber assault to the U.S.
military came from China. The assault was narrowed down to three routers and 20
workstations. That's fairly precise stuff. Alan Paller, director of the SANS Institute,
said the attacks came from China and that the Chinese government had a hand in it.
In December, Paller suggested the attacks had been traced to Guangdong and the techniques
in play suggest precision that only comes from the military. Without getting overly
acusatory, it would seem China has a vested interest in what the U.S. and the U.K. have in
the hidden away computer systems dealing national secrets.
So what happens now? Paller works for a government organization and levied these charges.
The British Government hasn't charged China directly, but conversations certainly allude
to it. Let's say they do charge people in China with the assault. Do those folks work with
the Chinese government? Is Guangdong the home of an actual military base in China?
Let's say we find out China is behind all this stuff. We've traced it back to Chinese
government computers. We accuse them on the international stage. Then things really heat
up. The rhetoric is flying in all directions like manure from flying cows. Do we go to
war? How far will we go?
Maybe the better answer would be to simply improve our nation's and the U.K.'s
cyber-networks. It may take some time and money to get it done but it beats the
alternative. As technology progresses, the problem will only get worse as well. The
governments need quality equipment with quality people. And besides, I hear there some
hackers in Spain needing a job.
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